Gome, sweet Gome

Guomei (国美), known as Gome in English, is a chain of electronics and home appliance supermarkets. The company was in the news last year when Euromoney magazine put CEO Huang Guangyu on its list of 100 richest Chinese.

Now Gome is back in the news because they are suing a man named Hao Peng for domain name and trademark squatting. According to Xinhua, Hao Peng registered the domain name 'guomei.com' and also registered a trademark consisting of the pinyin 'guomei' together with a logo. His malicious cybersquatting intentions are apparently proved by the fact that his website stated that the domain name / website was available for sale, rent or advertising.

Gome is suing him to demand he gives up both the domain name and the trademark, and also pay RMB 24,000 in legal costs.

The strange thing is that if you visit guomei.com, it seems to be owned by a woman named May Guo, and is registered to a San Francisco address.

Perhaps this case should make Gome's branding people wonder why they chose such a ridiculous English name.

UPDATE:
Hao Peng does business in domain names here, squatting on AsiaEDU.com and ChinaPetrol.com, to name two brought up in the Gome suit last fall (Chinese article). The guomei.com website suspiciously has no-archive tags on it, but one can see from a Haopeng.com archive here that it was being offered for sale in 2002.

Though registered to an address in SF, guomei.com lists a mobile phone number in Shandong as contact info. Furthermore, there's a wonderful page stating that the domain is empty here, in Chinese.

But here's the kicker: this page with a cute kid and peculiar English has a Google AdSense account number identical to that on Haopeng.com. So unless Mr. Hao Peng is donating all of his ad money to the care and education of lovely Ms. May Guo in USA, he is getting rich off of curious IP-lawsuit watchers. --jdm

LINK:
Xinhua: guomei domain name is cybersquatted; Gome claims damages of 20,000 yuan (in Chinese)
Gome's website Gome.com.cn or Guomei.com.cn